When was the Big Ten cool? I mean, you can make a strong argument that the Big Ten was never cool, but in the context of college football and whether or not the rest of the country looks at the conference in admiration/fear/respect, I'm not sure that the Big Ten has (in the last few decades) carried the kind of cache that, say, the SEC regularly does.
Except one time. I think that the creation of the Big Ten Network was a masterstroke that changed the way we view college sports and also brought in a metric assload of cash to the conference.